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Don't worry too much about keywords that are that similar. Google's algorithms are smart enough to recognize these small variations. Moreover, as you say yourself, this will lead to awful content and thus a bad user experience. Unless these two words mean totally different things (which they don't), don't start rewriting everything because it simply won't change your rankings.

For technical matters regarding your hosting and server, I would address a hosting company. For the rest all the speed optimizations (caching, CDN,...) are ok so I wouldn't waste too much time on that anymore. You can maybe check this mobile site tester from Google, but it won't give you much new information. The pagespeedinsights-report do show a good page speed, so this will not be affecting your rankings.

Hello there, Thanks for your suggestions and sorry for the late response. In fact, I also left an inquiry with the Bing Webmaster Tools mail support (I did not even realise they offered this service), and they answered within one day. They confirmed that the site runs without any errors and that the sitemap has now been submitted successfully. Upon checking I can confirm this (the sitemaps URLs have finally been submitted). Therefore, all is in order now. I still do not understand why prior to this the JA sitemap URLs were not being submitted (for weeks), even though I tried to make Bing Webmaster Tools re-crawl it by re-submitting the sitemap. In any case, I guess this is one of these episodes where the problem simply fixed itself. Kudos to their support though... Thanks everyone

Thank you for the response, Zee. I've been told that Google is "familiar" with character escaping and will interpret the description correctly. Is there a way to confirm this? We're programmatically populating meta descriptions for one of our applications and having trouble converting the HTML entity characters. Thank you Ellen-

Hi there, as effectdigital says above, Google has a tendency to append brand to the end of a title tag where it thinks it's confident of it.  I think the question here is - how much do you mind it being added to the end? I think unless it's causing active harm (which I think it probably isn't) probably most effective to just leave it and focus on other things. Wish we had the answer you were looking for!

Hi there! There seems to be a bit of confusion in this thread between URL structure and Information Architecture. Having more folders in a URL doesn't reduce the authority but pages with more folders in the URL tend to be deeper in the sites linking architecture, which means they tend to have less authority because they aren't as close to the surface. The difference between internal links and url format is an important one. There's a blog post here which explains in more depth. From my perspective, here are the benefits of having pages within folders; There is an opportunity to put more relevant keywords in the URL without stuffing Easier folder-level reporting in Google Analytics, Search Console etc. Some increased understanding for Google of how pages hang together - there is some evidence that Google uses folder structure for ranking before it knows much about the page for example. In terms of managing authority for pages and signals of relevance I'd be looking much more towards the internal linking to those pages. I wouldn't rely on Google intuitively understanding the topical connection between two pages unless both of those pages target that topic or have relevant links between them. So for example, say you have two pages; site.com/widgets site.com/doodads If those pages are both subcategories of trinkets you could reformat them to be; site.com/trinkets/widgets site.com/trinkets/doodads Having "trinkets" in the url might help both pages rank for "trinkets" type keywords, like "doodad trinkets" for example. However, I wouldn't rely on this change to help Google understand that widgets are related to doodads - you can handle that much more effectively with relevant internal links between /widgets and /doodads that make the relation clear. In terms of whether there is a risk to making this change - this is essentially a migration and definitely comes with risks associated, even if all of your redirects are 1:1 and direct. It'll take time for Google to find the redirects and new pages, and as a rule of thumb, link equity isn't passed perfectly along a 301 redirect so I wouldn't expect these new pages to just inherit the strength of the old ones. I think it comes down to weighing up whether the benefits I listed above outweigh the risk of an in-site migration. If you think the keyword targeting opportunities will make enough of a difference then great but I wouldn't rely on url structure as a way to get Google to understand your site differently - the impact of internal links is going to be a far greater factor.

I tend to use the base domain as the site's 'home' language (e.g: if the blog was first conceived in the UK and the authors live in the UK, then I'd use "/" as en-GB). I only create sub-folders for the 'additional' languages (e.g: "/nl", "/de", "/fr" etc) Even 301 redirects can dilute SEO authority a little (or a lot, under the wrong circumstances). Since lots of webmasters and editors will just 'lazy-link' to the base domain (or because it makes the link look cleaner / more legit within their content) I'd have your primary language deployment at the base domain, then all the rest in sub-folders This is my go-to approach and to be honest it's never failed me yet

Hard to tell what to do without seeing specifically where this error is coming up, but it usually has something to do with font sizes being too small on mobile devices. Mobiles have much more densely packed pixels on their screens (images are sharper, the pixels are smaller and more numerous). This means that 12 pixels (font-size) on desktop can look like 5 or 6 pixels on mobile devices (or even smaller) This is why, with responsive design, many people don't specify a pixel-based font-size. They'll make the font size relative (rather than absolute) somehow, be that by calculating pixel width against screen width as some percentage, or by working with newer font-sizing specifications (there are many, and many ways to use them). It's all about inflating font-sizes on devices with more densely packed pixel screens, so that the fonts don't come out looking minuscule Sometimes you can get errors where, even though the site's design is responsive, as someone was writing text in the CMS text editor - it appended styling info including the px font-size, which is then inlined (overruling all your perfectly thought out font-sizing CSS rules) If it's not mobile related at all, it's likely that the font is just generally too small

The value passed from one page to another is divided by the number of links that are linking out of that page. So all links in the navigation and drop down navigation will count. The following video does a really good job of explaining PageRank and I highly recommend it. https://blog.majestic.com/company/understanding-googles-algorithm-how-pagerank-works/

@Donna Duncan    thanks for clearing this issue it helped me understand Redirect Chain and how to fix it thanks

You will place the same canonical tag on both pages... The page at www.domainintheserps.com/product-a/ will appear in the SERPs. The page at www.othersite.com/product-a/ will not appear in the SERPs (if google finds and obeys your canonical tag) The value of all links (including internal links) that point to www.othersite.com/product-a/ will be transferred to www.domainintheserps.com/product-a/       All of those links will show in your Google search console backlinks. If your pages are not identical or if Google doesn't like one of your sites or one of your pages, it is possible that Google will ignore you instructions.  Canonical tags are suggestions not commands.   Also, Google can be very slow to find and obey canonical tags.  It can take months. Your page at www.othersite.com/product-a/ will sometimes appear in the SERPs for any of the following queries site:othersite.com site:domainintheserps.com site:othersite.com product-a site:domainintheserps.com product-a So, your competitors can figure out if you are doing this stuff. I forgot to answer one of your questions... "Does it still index"?       Maybe.  It will likely be indexed upon discovery.  Then, at a later time, the canonical will be obeyed and it will drop from the SERPs.

We don't sell online and I'm having the exact same problem. I'd love to implement Schema but I don't see how without listing a price.

Two main options: Edit your template so that for additional pages it just adds something like "P2" or "Page 2" to the page title. This is the preferred option Block Rogerbot from crawling paginated content (https://moz.com/community/q/prevent-rodger-bot-for-crwaling-pagination) - this however, would block Rogerbot (Moz's crawler) from identifying other issues you might have with your paginated content / URLs

I wouldn't say there would be massive chances of a penalty here, that being said it's an area where you could be 'adding value' and uniqueness to your pages and you're not doing it. So your pages may be 'less competitive' and you may be missing out on an opportunity. It's more of a competitive missed opportunity than an 'error' per-se In reality you should have one product page for each product and then just have 'product variants' for stuff like quantity, size, colour etc. On the modern web people find this easier to navigate and since many sites do offer that, they might seem like more competitive places to shop for paint cans than your site. Price does matter, but it's not the sole arbiter of how products are ranked on Google's search engine - other stuff matters too. Unless you have a virtual monopoly on the product (only you can sell it, or only you can sell it at a greatly discounted price due to a special relationship with the supplier) then I would consider the UX and design of your site. No one wants an 'arse-ache' of a browsing experience Many tools will flag what you are about to do as duplicate content and they're technically right. But instead of going on some crazy copy-writing crusade, think about the architecture of your site. You can still have separate URLs for different product variations if you want, even via parameter-variables (though that's a bit of a 'basic' implementation). If you make it clear to Google through new, more streamlined architecture that they're all actually the same product, the duplicate description(s) won't matter 'as much' (though they'll still be a missed opportunity for more diverse rankings IMO) You can make it even more apparent to Google that all the different variations are actually the 'same product' by utilising Product schema and some of the deeper stuff like ProductModel which will bind it all together. Whatever you implement, test it here. If this tool throws errors and warnings, keep working away until they're all fixed Canonical tags are another option but they will decrease your ranking 'footprint' and in this case I wouldn't recommend them, despite 'slight' content duplication risk (which in reality, are mostly negligible) Final note: you say you have 'unique' descriptions, but remember if they're used elsewhere online they're not unique. If they're unique internally that's great, but if you got them all from a supplier then... obviously loads of other sites are probably using them, which could easily be a big issue for you

Screaming Frog is good for crawling an existing Sitemap.xml file and can indeed produce Sitemap.xml files, but if our site is medium-sized (thousands of URLs) then really you'd want a dynamic one. Pretty sure the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress has this built in with some tweak options and variables, probably start there With Screaming Frog you'd have to keep manually re-building your sitemap XML / XML index file. Sounds pointless, boring and tedious when relatively stable dynamic options exist

With the caveat that I'm not an expert in the affiliate space, the advice I have typically seen given in these situations is to put all the targets of the links on your site into a folder like /outbound/ and then block that entire folder in robots.txt so that the search engines don't crawl those links / don't see the 301s. I wouldn't have thought that would be sufficient to think that they don't realise that you are running an affiliate model, but there's nothing wrong with that business model per se. As far as linking out and sending people off to another site a lot, no, that sounds like the right user experience in this situation, and I can't think of any other way of achieving what you are trying to do. Good luck.

Give more details of your site and the allegations against you

Look at how starbucks does theirs in the states. Make it a locatoin info page. Pictures, address, contact info, ratings, reviews, descriton of the area (historical, new, corporate) and anything else like menus, services , valet, and etc.

What are you trying to achieve, what are you using the pipe symbol for?

Hi SEOCT! It's completely fine to have different website designs for different regions. You have to be sure that the content is targeted to the selected country and that you've set the correct configuration of hreflangs. When it comes to hreflangs, remember that it has to have a self-referential tag too. For some further information: Tell Google about localized versions of your page - Google Search Console help These resources always come handy in cases like this: Hreflang generator - Aleyda Solis International SEO - Moz Learning Center The Guide to International Website Expansion: Hreflang, ccTLDs, & More! - Moz Blog The International SEO Checklist - Moz Blog Best luck. Hope it helps. Gaston